This Julio Jones stat from the Falcons' Week 12 win is ludicrous

This Julio Jones stat from the Falcons' Week 12 win is ludicrous

Not everyone buys into Pro Football Focus’ official grading system, and that’s fair. Sometimes it produces telling stats that can really drive home a point about a player’s performance, though.

For example, in the Falcons’ 34-20 win over the Buccaneers, Julio Jones caught 12-of-15 targets for 253 yards and two touchdowns. For that remarkable outing, PFF gave him a 99.9 rating — the same grade Adrian Clayborn got for his six-sack game against Dallas two weeks ago.

What does that mean exactly? Were Jones and Clayborn both literally one-tenth of one percent shy of a perfect game? How do you even quantify that kind of thing? Like everything else in life, it’s an imperfect system, but they both played phenomenally.

For the skeptics, here’s a number that captures how brilliant Jones was against the hapless Buccaneers on Sunday: According to PFF, Jones averaged an absolutely ludicrous 7.67 yards per route run, which matches Cowboys wideout Cole Beasley’s season average per catch.

It’s hard to play any better than Jones did. He beat the Bucs on deep passes, on crossing routes, on out breaking routes, on … well you get the picture. No Buc could cover him, whether help was provided or not as he went off for a quite ridiculous 7.67 yards for every ROUTE that he ran. By way of comparison Cole Beasley has 7.6 yards for every CATCH he makes.

For context, Jones has led the NFL in this category over the last several seasons, averaging around three yards per route run. So, this particular performance against Tampa Bay’s secondary was well over double his usual rate, which was already significantly higher than any other receiver’s in the league.